I've watched my teenage son kill a cell phone and a 4th gen Nano merely with palm sweat during runs. Apple denied warranty repair/replace for the four month old Nano, based on it's immersion detector. I've avoided same by cupping my cell phone and putting my Touch in a neoprene belt holder.
Not too many years ago, as the IT offshoring was really picking up steam, it turned out that a number of records transcription shops were farming out their work to subs who turned around and passed the work to offshore typing pools.
And, the doctors and patients were none the wiser until a Pakistani typist felt she was getting screwed by her job shop, and passed the threat upstream that she'd selling or post her data on-line if she didn't get paid. This turned into a major HIPAA-related Federal case for the responsible parties (doctors, IT shops) in the US.
My health provider has offshored a lot of its application dev. This reminds me to do some more research into what they're doing with my data. My dentist is self-employed, and I'll need to remind him resist any temptation he's having to use Google Apps for my dental data. If I find out he does it anyway, I won't hesitate a second to drop a dime on him.
Charge for GPL? OMFG, Don't Tell Stallman... or he'll laugh you out of his IM session for naivete. As a number of posters have pointed out, people can and do charge money for GPL software all the time. Hell, if your iPhone app is GPL'ed, there's nothing stopping *me* from turning around and selling your app (but probably not via iTunes, Apple's got your back). As long as you provide a method for me to obtain the source for your app at something within shouting distance of the cost for you to provide it, you're good to go.
The Air Force's study is based on a real world example, a Titan IV with strap-on SRBs, one of which failed spectacularly. Based on my reading of the "report", in reality a short slide set, I believe the analysts neglected the Orion LAS, and assumed the crew capsule follows the same ballistic arc as the burning fuel debris.
The launch abort system (ideally) imparts an added 5 seconds of forward velocity to the capsule, which I'd hope/think would be enough to pull the crew beyond the ballistic path of the shell of debris.
Your mention of ad-hoc networks reminded me of the XO I got on the BO-GO program a couple of years back. Compared to the variations on wi-fi w/ Linux/OSX/Windows I've played with, the XO could *really* haul in the connections, finding hot-spots and meshes I had no idea existed near my place. I don't know how h/w dependent the OLPC Mesh/wi-fi modules are.
A nice Paranoid Linux option would be to spoof the MAC addr. After getting all encrypted and proxied up, a final and truly paranoid (and PITA to implement) feature would try to mimic the idiosyncrasies of various networking stacks.
For starters, the good professor is an idiot. He has worked on DoD contracts, and either knew or should have known that from the moment he started developing on the DoD's dime, any technology he dealt in not already a standard part of a BSEE/CS/Chem/Physics degree program in the US was going to be suspect under ITAR.
In addition, the import and export of any commercial item is subject to review under the Export Administration Regulations of the DoC. And, as Dr. Roth is being reminded the hard way, "export" can occur the moment a foreign national or domestic agent of a foreign nation groks your IP.
You may not agree with the law as it stands, but the Federal Government is on very strong Constitutional ground with respect to whatever border controls it chooses to enact. So, your options are: 1) follow the laws, 2) not follow the laws, and/or 3) bug your representatives to change the law. You can select (2), and many do, but it's kind of like not paying your income taxes for a few years: it sucks big time when you get caught.
Hawking is talking about cultural adaptation, which isn't a new concept. What's (relatively) new is the realization that human evolution has continued into historic times. So, Homo gets three bites at the apple: a chance to adapt via culture, enabling it to survive in environments that would otherwise select against it; adapt via thus far dormant or undesirable existing genetic characteristics; and adapt via continuing random mutation (most of which will continue to be undesirable for a given situation).
I think that something to keep in mind is the "Free Beer" vs. "Free Speech" aspects. Anderson/Gladwell/Yglesias are focusing on the Free Beer side. For instance:
- Google is giving away a video sharing service, free beer. - RedHat sells a product that can be copied, modified, and sold or given away by customers, free speech.
Google elected to give away the video service, but isn't dependent on serving free video.
RedHat's business stands upon contributing to and selling a product that others contributed to and sold.
RedHat's customers are free to do with that product just about whatever they want with, as long as the customer's don't turn around and market themselves as RedHat (ergo, CentOS doesn't get sued). YouTube users are limited by the copyrights on the uploaded material, and Google's willingness to fund the service.
In either case, competition has destroyed potential profit that would accrue to a monopolist. However, there is money to be made in Free Speech, provided one adds value of some sort. There is no money in Free Beer, other than to deny potential competitors a market, or as just another form of marketing overhead.
Damn, you beat me to it. To your link, I'll add the abstract of his post:
Where Anderson goes off the rails is his suggestion that the "give it away" business model is actually a promising business model.
Competition is good for customers because it destroys profits. The way you make real money is by getting into situations where you're insulated from competition. Meanwhile, as market sectors turn to a Free business model, they're just going to become way less lucrative.
Example: YouTube loses money. But since Google as a whole can easily afford to cover YouTube's losses, it's hard to see Google management shutting down a market-leader. As the underlying technology gets cheaper the scale of the losses should get smaller, making it ever-more-realistic to run the business at a loss and thus ever-less-likely that a pay-to-play vendor can move in and charge monopoly rents.
That's the real lesson of Free. The combination of competition, the near-zero marginal cost of production, and the customer draw of zero pricing means that the market-leader in video is bound to lose money. To win the market, you need to make your product Free. But while your marginal cost is near-zero, it's not actually zero, so you're losing money.
Every business entity has something their coulda/woulda/shoulda done differently. And, every stock holder wants complete transparency for all business dealings and information but their own.
Apple feels it realizes a business advantage from playing its cards a bit closer to the vest than - say - Dell. The only difference, the only difference between the trade secrets Apple holds dear (starting from the very existence of an unreleased product, on down) to those for Dell (a US$0.02 price advantage on sata cables) is that Apple's are vastly more interesting to read about.
Therefore, what Apple considers a trade secret is of great financial interest to writers and publishers who are accustomed to knowing every corporate detail except how the execs are manipulating the company stock this week, and which subordinates they're dicking.
If the press, or more to the point the stockholders, don't think they're feeling enough love, they can sell the other owners on the Transparent Apple, Inc. concept at the next stockholders meeting, and vote a new board accordingly. Until I see signs of a nasty proxy fight over this, the whole thing is made up news, or in the word of the metatags, !news.
You've hit the nail on the head. If someone wants to publish a Wii title, they should design for it.
For example: "Crysis was highly advanced and required a lot of processing power; the world size and dynamic loading, the draw distance, the number of polygons in the characters... If we had done an Xbox 360 version, it would have been toned down, probably linear; it wouldn't have been an open-world game, and so it would have been a very different experience."
Granted, multi-national corporations have been shifting funds to overseas subsidiaries as a tax dodge for years. The fact that they've gotten used to it doesn't hide the fact that it's a dodge, no different that me hiding my wages in the Caymans, but easier to hide from the tax authorities. If Ballmer and every last GD US-based company that's been leaning on this technique wants to blow out of town because they have to pay full freight, let 'em. If they'd actually pay based on their in-country net, the net result would be the same, the difference being the point of collection would shift over a few value-added steps from the employees.
Do it now, so someone who wants to do business in the US can take advantage of the market opening. If no one does, at least we can all be open and deal with the economy as it really is, rather than what we're pretending it to be.
I haven't played with MacTCP in at least 10 years, and never on my local network. When I haul out an old powerbook loaded with Open Transport, DHCP over Cat5 and 802.11b work fine. This guy shows how to get your ethernet'ed-model online with DSL by using Open Transport and OS 7.6.1, which would get you linked on your local network as well.
If we're gonna get into a how-old-is-my-crap thread: my oldest working gear is a 1989 Mac ][ci running NetBSD that I periodically haul out of the closet to use as a testbed within my private network. Used to be my dad's photoshop box, then handed down to my wife, and finally into my grubby paws. Its small, easy to store, boxy shape has saved it from her annual pogroms against old gear.
I agree, they'll have to be careful. In the CSI/Fishman case, I believe they just backdated documents. This worked for the CoS senior staff because they were (and are) a tightly knit group, with a number of incentives not to break ranks. Since those days, I suspect the CoS has put the needed asset protection paper trail in place (or a plan to do so) for all of the public-facing subsidiaries.
IIRC, when the Church of Scientology Internationallost a major lawsuit by Steve Fishman, the church executives turned the CSI into a shell, transferring virtually all capital and IP to the Religious Technology Center(which licensed "its" IP back to the CSI), theoretically leaving the plaintiff with nothing from which he could collect.
I wouldn't be surprised to find that although the Paris center is incorporated independently of the mother church, and that it'll turn out that, like every Hollywood production, they've been "broke" all along.
I had always wondered when law firms finally made the switch from WP to Word. IIRC, the only reason WP hung on for so long there was the installed base of templates. That points to why a law office can make Word work. Most of their output is boilerplate, cast within simple, strict formats, and no points for beauty. The law never started with TeX, InDesign, etc, so it's no surprise they went with Word.
Not that some of academia or small publishers won't try the new Word features, but I wager they won't like it. The core argument against using a Wysiwyg tool for research papers - that the authors get distracted by spending too much time dicking with the format - still stands. And, last I tried, Word still doesn't play nice with large, heavily formatted documents.
Legal to tail a cop? That's a good point, one that said officer would probably discuss with us after an hour or so. I was thinking in the other direction. Having RTFA, but not the ruling itself, I object to the concept that the GPS was no different that tailing the suspect. Does a tail follow someone into their garage? Really, this is the sort of hair splitting that determines whether we get to kick the camel's nose when it comes under the tent flap.
The judge used the wrong analogy. This wasn't like a tail. This was like a cop sitting on the suspect's trunk lid.
Unless someone else in the family chimes in that it was all the doing of space aliens, I think you two covered the query. Kudos to your folks for the great prep work.
After reading the story, this sounds like a sure-fire "Outliers" scenario. The Adams brothers lived near Cape Canaveral. Richard constructed a video camera as an adolescent, before building a custom 16-bit computer from scratch, when all of the kits were strictly 8-bit. Richard, Scott, and Eric programmed the system initially from front panel switches, until Richard build a keyboard, based on existing designs. Just as Bill Gates created Altair BASIC at what was most likely the earliest possible moment, so with the Adams brothers getting their start.
It would be interesting to know what the family, school, and social background that gave them the shot at such an early entre into digital hacking.
I think it's useful to develop an open web 3d standard, despite the dancing GIF animations it brings to mind. What I foresee is either MS or MS sock puppet(s) getting a seat at the table. Suddenly, "Open" ActiveX is the solution.
Why would the US economists (whoever those are supposed to be) need to come up with an excuse for helping bring millions of dirt-poor peasants into the modern era with some fure prospects?
"Whoever": Gregory Mankiw, Tim Kane, Douglas J. Young, Brink Lindsey, just about anyone at Heritage, Cato, the Club for Growth. I can go on, but that'll get you started.
"Why": Around about the time when everyone notices that US firms, whether US or foreign based, have cleared out their engineering and design staff. Around about the time when we notice that the back of an iPod's packaging changes from "Designed in California/Made in China" to "Designed and Made in China". Around about the time when we notice just about any non-defense manufacturing firm in the US seems to consist solely of a corporate office and a distribution system.
I'm broad brushing, but I think that illustrates the idea. We won't have to *care* unless more firms that currently design anything in the US finish moving the rest of their R&D offshore. An honest evaluation would start with former Federal Reserve vice chairman and Princeton economist Alan Blinder comment: "Conditions of full employment are required to validate standard propositions in trade theory. High unemployment calls many of these propositions into question."
It doesn't surprise me that the PRC government wants to encourage adding value to it's economy, by moving up beyond manufacturing to design. Hell, it was going to happen even without becoming public policy.
US economists, particularly those on a grant to say so, have gone on about the constructive destruction of the US economy. I can't count the times I've heard the analogy about Ford and the buggy whip. But, it's a bad analogy. Does it work when Henry isn't American, or doesn't make his investment in the US?
Constructive destruction is an attempt to describe a kind of economic activity, the redirection of capital and investment. But, it's not graven in stone that it's a benefit for any particular economic player, even if that player is the USofA.
But, just as those US economists made excuses for the hollowing out of US manufacturing (we'll move into design, we'll go upmarket), they'll think up new excuses now, and they'll probably pass muster at editorial boards and newsrooms as gospel.
In the meantime, the goals the Beijing government has set have INFLATION spray painted all over them, in dayglow.
Sure, You've Discredited Ohm, But...
on
You Are Not a Lawyer
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
So, let's assume you've discredited Ohm to some degree. But, is that degree relevant? The general points you've made to do so have some merit. However, Mr. Ohm is probably a lot closer to having the pulse of the US legal community that you or I. Therefore, even if he's done work for the RIAA, Exxon/Mobil, Altria, SCO, *and* Lord Cheney himself, his legal insights are going to carry more weight than ours. Why? Because he (probably) has much more extensive experience in how DAs, courts, and Federal/State/Local law enforcement work than we do.
Hell, even a law professor at Liberty University - of all places - has a leg up on 99.007% of the citizens when it comes time to decide: 1) am I about to step into the kimchee, and 2) if I do, what my odds are of keeping my okole and my assets out of harms way.
Slashdot Mirror
I've watched my teenage son kill a cell phone and a 4th gen Nano merely with palm sweat during runs. Apple denied warranty repair/replace for the four month old Nano, based on it's immersion detector. I've avoided same by cupping my cell phone and putting my Touch in a neoprene belt holder.
Not too many years ago, as the IT offshoring was really picking up steam, it turned out that a number of records transcription shops were farming out their work to subs who turned around and passed the work to offshore typing pools.
And, the doctors and patients were none the wiser until a Pakistani typist felt she was getting screwed by her job shop, and passed the threat upstream that she'd selling or post her data on-line if she didn't get paid. This turned into a major HIPAA-related Federal case for the responsible parties (doctors, IT shops) in the US.
My health provider has offshored a lot of its application dev. This reminds me to do some more research into what they're doing with my data. My dentist is self-employed, and I'll need to remind him resist any temptation he's having to use Google Apps for my dental data. If I find out he does it anyway, I won't hesitate a second to drop a dime on him.
Charge for GPL? OMFG, Don't Tell Stallman... or he'll laugh you out of his IM session for naivete. As a number of posters have pointed out, people can and do charge money for GPL software all the time. Hell, if your iPhone app is GPL'ed, there's nothing stopping *me* from turning around and selling your app (but probably not via iTunes, Apple's got your back). As long as you provide a method for me to obtain the source for your app at something within shouting distance of the cost for you to provide it, you're good to go.
The Air Force's study is based on a real world example, a Titan IV with strap-on SRBs, one of which failed spectacularly. Based on my reading of the "report", in reality a short slide set, I believe the analysts neglected the Orion LAS, and assumed the crew capsule follows the same ballistic arc as the burning fuel debris.
The launch abort system (ideally) imparts an added 5 seconds of forward velocity to the capsule, which I'd hope/think would be enough to pull the crew beyond the ballistic path of the shell of debris.
Your mention of ad-hoc networks reminded me of the XO I got on the BO-GO program a couple of years back. Compared to the variations on wi-fi w/ Linux/OSX/Windows I've played with, the XO could *really* haul in the connections, finding hot-spots and meshes I had no idea existed near my place. I don't know how h/w dependent the OLPC Mesh/wi-fi modules are.
A nice Paranoid Linux option would be to spoof the MAC addr. After getting all encrypted and proxied up, a final and truly paranoid (and PITA to implement) feature would try to mimic the idiosyncrasies of various networking stacks.
For starters, the good professor is an idiot. He has worked on DoD contracts, and either knew or should have known that from the moment he started developing on the DoD's dime, any technology he dealt in not already a standard part of a BSEE/CS/Chem/Physics degree program in the US was going to be suspect under ITAR.
In addition, the import and export of any commercial item is subject to review under the Export Administration Regulations of the DoC. And, as Dr. Roth is being reminded the hard way, "export" can occur the moment a foreign national or domestic agent of a foreign nation groks your IP.
You may not agree with the law as it stands, but the Federal Government is on very strong Constitutional ground with respect to whatever border controls it chooses to enact. So, your options are: 1) follow the laws, 2) not follow the laws, and/or 3) bug your representatives to change the law. You can select (2), and many do, but it's kind of like not paying your income taxes for a few years: it sucks big time when you get caught.
Hawking is talking about cultural adaptation, which isn't a new concept. What's (relatively) new is the realization that human evolution has continued into historic times. So, Homo gets three bites at the apple: a chance to adapt via culture, enabling it to survive in environments that would otherwise select against it; adapt via thus far dormant or undesirable existing genetic characteristics; and adapt via continuing random mutation (most of which will continue to be undesirable for a given situation).
I think that something to keep in mind is the "Free Beer" vs. "Free Speech" aspects. Anderson/Gladwell/Yglesias are focusing on the Free Beer side. For instance:
- Google is giving away a video sharing service, free beer.
- RedHat sells a product that can be copied, modified, and sold or given away by customers, free speech.
Google elected to give away the video service, but isn't dependent on serving free video.
RedHat's business stands upon contributing to and selling a product that others contributed to and sold.
RedHat's customers are free to do with that product just about whatever they want with, as long as the customer's don't turn around and market themselves as RedHat (ergo, CentOS doesn't get sued). YouTube users are limited by the copyrights on the uploaded material, and Google's willingness to fund the service.
In either case, competition has destroyed potential profit that would accrue to a monopolist. However, there is money to be made in Free Speech, provided one adds value of some sort. There is no money in Free Beer, other than to deny potential competitors a market, or as just another form of marketing overhead.
Damn, you beat me to it. To your link, I'll add the abstract of his post:
Where Anderson goes off the rails is his suggestion that the "give it away" business model is actually a promising business model.
Competition is good for customers because it destroys profits. The way you make real money is by getting into situations where you're insulated from competition. Meanwhile, as market sectors turn to a Free business model, they're just going to become way less lucrative.
Example: YouTube loses money. But since Google as a whole can easily afford to cover YouTube's losses, it's hard to see Google management shutting down a market-leader. As the underlying technology gets cheaper the scale of the losses should get smaller, making it ever-more-realistic to run the business at a loss and thus ever-less-likely that a pay-to-play vendor can move in and charge monopoly rents.
That's the real lesson of Free. The combination of competition, the near-zero marginal cost of production, and the customer draw of zero pricing means that the market-leader in video is bound to lose money. To win the market, you need to make your product Free. But while your marginal cost is near-zero, it's not actually zero, so you're losing money.
Every business entity has something their coulda/woulda/shoulda done differently. And, every stock holder wants complete transparency for all business dealings and information but their own.
Apple feels it realizes a business advantage from playing its cards a bit closer to the vest than - say - Dell. The only difference, the only difference between the trade secrets Apple holds dear (starting from the very existence of an unreleased product, on down) to those for Dell (a US$0.02 price advantage on sata cables) is that Apple's are vastly more interesting to read about.
Therefore, what Apple considers a trade secret is of great financial interest to writers and publishers who are accustomed to knowing every corporate detail except how the execs are manipulating the company stock this week, and which subordinates they're dicking.
If the press, or more to the point the stockholders, don't think they're feeling enough love, they can sell the other owners on the Transparent Apple, Inc. concept at the next stockholders meeting, and vote a new board accordingly. Until I see signs of a nasty proxy fight over this, the whole thing is made up news, or in the word of the metatags, !news.
You've hit the nail on the head. If someone wants to publish a Wii title, they should design for it.
For example: "Crysis was highly advanced and required a lot of processing power; the world size and dynamic loading, the draw distance, the number of polygons in the characters... If we had done an Xbox 360 version, it would have been toned down, probably linear; it wouldn't have been an open-world game, and so it would have been a very different experience."
Granted, multi-national corporations have been shifting funds to overseas subsidiaries as a tax dodge for years. The fact that they've gotten used to it doesn't hide the fact that it's a dodge, no different that me hiding my wages in the Caymans, but easier to hide from the tax authorities. If Ballmer and every last GD US-based company that's been leaning on this technique wants to blow out of town because they have to pay full freight, let 'em. If they'd actually pay based on their in-country net, the net result would be the same, the difference being the point of collection would shift over a few value-added steps from the employees.
Do it now, so someone who wants to do business in the US can take advantage of the market opening. If no one does, at least we can all be open and deal with the economy as it really is, rather than what we're pretending it to be.
I haven't played with MacTCP in at least 10 years, and never on my local network. When I haul out an old powerbook loaded with Open Transport, DHCP over Cat5 and 802.11b work fine. This guy shows how to get your ethernet'ed-model online with DSL by using Open Transport and OS 7.6.1, which would get you linked on your local network as well.
If we're gonna get into a how-old-is-my-crap thread: my oldest working gear is a 1989 Mac ][ci running NetBSD that I periodically haul out of the closet to use as a testbed within my private network. Used to be my dad's photoshop box, then handed down to my wife, and finally into my grubby paws. Its small, easy to store, boxy shape has saved it from her annual pogroms against old gear.
I agree, they'll have to be careful. In the CSI/Fishman case, I believe they just backdated documents. This worked for the CoS senior staff because they were (and are) a tightly knit group, with a number of incentives not to break ranks. Since those days, I suspect the CoS has put the needed asset protection paper trail in place (or a plan to do so) for all of the public-facing subsidiaries.
IIRC, when the Church of Scientology Internationallost a major lawsuit by Steve Fishman, the church executives turned the CSI into a shell, transferring virtually all capital and IP to the Religious Technology Center(which licensed "its" IP back to the CSI), theoretically leaving the plaintiff with nothing from which he could collect.
I wouldn't be surprised to find that although the Paris center is incorporated independently of the mother church, and that it'll turn out that, like every Hollywood production, they've been "broke" all along.
I had always wondered when law firms finally made the switch from WP to Word. IIRC, the only reason WP hung on for so long there was the installed base of templates. That points to why a law office can make Word work. Most of their output is boilerplate, cast within simple, strict formats, and no points for beauty. The law never started with TeX, InDesign, etc, so it's no surprise they went with Word.
Not that some of academia or small publishers won't try the new Word features, but I wager they won't like it. The core argument against using a Wysiwyg tool for research papers - that the authors get distracted by spending too much time dicking with the format - still stands. And, last I tried, Word still doesn't play nice with large, heavily formatted documents.
Legal to tail a cop? That's a good point, one that said officer would probably discuss with us after an hour or so. I was thinking in the other direction. Having RTFA, but not the ruling itself, I object to the concept that the GPS was no different that tailing the suspect. Does a tail follow someone into their garage? Really, this is the sort of hair splitting that determines whether we get to kick the camel's nose when it comes under the tent flap.
The judge used the wrong analogy. This wasn't like a tail. This was like a cop sitting on the suspect's trunk lid.
Unless someone else in the family chimes in that it was all the doing of space aliens, I think you two covered the query. Kudos to your folks for the great prep work.
After reading the story, this sounds like a sure-fire "Outliers" scenario. The Adams brothers lived near Cape Canaveral. Richard constructed a video camera as an adolescent, before building a custom 16-bit computer from scratch, when all of the kits were strictly 8-bit. Richard, Scott, and Eric programmed the system initially from front panel switches, until Richard build a keyboard, based on existing designs. Just as Bill Gates created Altair BASIC at what was most likely the earliest possible moment, so with the Adams brothers getting their start.
It would be interesting to know what the family, school, and social background that gave them the shot at such an early entre into digital hacking.
I think it's useful to develop an open web 3d standard, despite the dancing GIF animations it brings to mind. What I foresee is either MS or MS sock puppet(s) getting a seat at the table. Suddenly, "Open" ActiveX is the solution.
The parent is correct, this is a static vs. dynamic web transition. I suppose "DREAMWEAVER is DEAD" is catchier.
Now, if we can just get ahead of the game on plugging those CMS security holes.
Why would the US economists (whoever those are supposed to be) need to come up with an excuse for helping bring millions of dirt-poor peasants into the modern era with some fure prospects?
"Whoever": Gregory Mankiw, Tim Kane, Douglas J. Young, Brink Lindsey, just about anyone at Heritage, Cato, the Club for Growth. I can go on, but that'll get you started.
"Why": Around about the time when everyone notices that US firms, whether US or foreign based, have cleared out their engineering and design staff. Around about the time when we notice that the back of an iPod's packaging changes from "Designed in California/Made in China" to "Designed and Made in China". Around about the time when we notice just about any non-defense manufacturing firm in the US seems to consist solely of a corporate office and a distribution system.
I'm broad brushing, but I think that illustrates the idea. We won't have to *care* unless more firms that currently design anything in the US finish moving the rest of their R&D offshore. An honest evaluation would start with former Federal Reserve vice chairman and Princeton economist Alan Blinder comment: "Conditions of full employment are required to validate standard propositions in trade theory. High unemployment calls many of these propositions into question."
It doesn't surprise me that the PRC government wants to encourage adding value to it's economy, by moving up beyond manufacturing to design. Hell, it was going to happen even without becoming public policy.
US economists, particularly those on a grant to say so, have gone on about the constructive destruction of the US economy. I can't count the times I've heard the analogy about Ford and the buggy whip. But, it's a bad analogy. Does it work when Henry isn't American, or doesn't make his investment in the US?
Constructive destruction is an attempt to describe a kind of economic activity, the redirection of capital and investment. But, it's not graven in stone that it's a benefit for any particular economic player, even if that player is the USofA.
But, just as those US economists made excuses for the hollowing out of US manufacturing (we'll move into design, we'll go upmarket), they'll think up new excuses now, and they'll probably pass muster at editorial boards and newsrooms as gospel.
In the meantime, the goals the Beijing government has set have INFLATION spray painted all over them, in dayglow.
So, let's assume you've discredited Ohm to some degree. But, is that degree relevant? The general points you've made to do so have some merit. However, Mr. Ohm is probably a lot closer to having the pulse of the US legal community that you or I. Therefore, even if he's done work for the RIAA, Exxon/Mobil, Altria, SCO, *and* Lord Cheney himself, his legal insights are going to carry more weight than ours. Why? Because he (probably) has much more extensive experience in how DAs, courts, and Federal/State/Local law enforcement work than we do.
Hell, even a law professor at Liberty University - of all places - has a leg up on 99.007% of the citizens when it comes time to decide: 1) am I about to step into the kimchee, and 2) if I do, what my odds are of keeping my okole and my assets out of harms way.